Friday 26 February 2016

Key Metrics for Effective Storage Performance and Capacity Reporting - Virtual Environments and Clusters (6 of 10)


Managing storage in clustered and/or virtual environments can be challenging because it is shared among all hosts and virtual machines running on it.   

Below is an example of a simple 3 node  VMware cluster going to some shared storage.


Features that are available

        Thin provisioning
        Storage can be viewed at many levels.
        Could be different tiers allocated to the same cluster
        Overhead at various points


Storage Virtualization

There are advantages to the layered system

        it allows a caching layer so that you may not have to go all the way to the backend to satisfy an I/O request
        there are a lot of administrator features regarding allocation and replication
Pooling physical storage from multiple sources into logical groupings is useful

        Can be a centralized source for collecting data
        If using as a data source beware of double counting with backend


There are a wide variety of techniques for virtualizing storage, be aware of the implications for data collection and reporting.

On Monday I’ll be discussing response impacts on performance capacity and metrics for these.

Dale Feiste
Principal Consultant




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